Organizational Culture, Rule-Governed Behavior and Organizational Behavior Management

Book excerpt: Organizational Culture, Rule-Governed Behavior and Organizational Behavior Management is an introduction to concepts that link organizational behavior management (OBM) with the fields of organizational ecology, cultural anthropology, organizational development, and organizational behavior. This important book can help OBM researchers and managers more precisely analyze complex work environments to develop more comprehensive yet highly focused interventions to improve individual and organizational effectiveness. Organizational Culture, Rule-Governed Behavior and Organizational Behavior Management includes theoretical accounts of rule-governed behavior and cultural practices that expand the OBM’s boundaries to include more comprehensive analyses and intervention designs that can lead to more effective and larger scale interventions. Although OBM researchers have long recognized that the relationships between an organization and its environment are important for survival, they have not made organization-environment relations a primary focus of their interventions. In addition, most descriptions of OBM interventions have not included a precise account of how the components of the interventions bring about ultimate performance changes they produce. With this book, OBM researchers will learn how to identify organizational behavior/performance targets that can be changed and adapted to constantly changing competitive environments to improve an organization’s chances of survival. It also outlines two theories of rule-governed behavior. These theories characterize and explain how rules and their descriptions work to change or maintain effects of delayed rewards on current behavior/performance relationships. In so doing, they fill in the missing links required to achieve more valid and precise analyses of work environments that can be expected to result in more precise and effective OBM interventions. In Organizational Culture, Rule-Governed Behavior and Organizational Behavior Management, OBM researchers will learn how organizational cultural practices, organizational effectiveness, and rule-governed behaviors in organizations interact in complex ways to determine, in part, the adaptability and long-term survival of organizations. Reading this book will help academics, researchers, and practitioners better understand and predict how people in organizations will react to OBM interventions. All OBM managers including high-level managers, members of boards of directors and their consultants who are attempting to develop more effective organizations, will benefit from these discussions of organizational adaptation changing competitive environments. This essential volume presents organizational culture concepts cast in OBM terms that can be understood by all OBM researchers and practitioners and will be useful to anyone interested in organizational development on a large scale. Professors teaching OBM courses will find this presentation of rule-governed behavior an essential ingredient to every course in OBM.